It hasn’t been that long at all since corporate enterprise IT was very highly controlled. The user population within performed their work on corporate, or organization, assets – typically Windows PCs. Art departments were the only “renegades” – utilizing Macs and other Apple devices – a sort of “foreign” territory, if anyone even gave much thought to “those guys.”

Business sponsored and sanctioned apps were run either at workstations or on physical servers in a data center, or centers. Most folks were familiar with a concept: The “computer room.” Security relied on borders drawn between internal networks, and the outside internet. Ah, those were simple days.

Today, an ever-increasing assortment of new devices is available to, and challenges, any organization. ESG research reports that 55% of enterprises are seeing significant increase in their employees’ use of endpoint computing devices such as Apple Macs, tablets, and smartphones – many of which are BYOD – bring your own device – and thus owned by the employees themselves.

Increasingly, employees are allowed to use many numbers of different devices in the routine course of conducting their business, on behalf of the larger business at-hand.

We’ll examine the impact mobile devices and their use is having today – and where this is likely to go in the future, in the coming articles. Stay tuned…